LibGuides: Anthropology How-to: Find Data : Canadian Data Sources

Canadian Data Sources

A note about Canadian data sources: Many datasets from Canadian sources are not in the public domain due to a desire to protect cultural resources and heritage sites. BC and other provinces have laws to protect and respect people's privacy, and laws and professional practices at every level of government and within scholarship aim to respect Indigenous knowledge and sovereignty. The data you seek may not be publicly available for these reasons. Furthermore Canada has only recently mandated the publicly funded research provide open data, this research data may be embargoed for a period of time for a variety of reasons, and we put our data in a variety of repositories - including national and provincial repositories, university repositories, publisher's repositories and more. These can be very specific in theme and focus, or they can be broad in scope.

There are a variety of ways to approach finding data - and often a combination is very useful.

Search for datasets in data repositories. Consider the source of the data you're seeking, and possible search terms or entry points (place is almost always useful).
Search for relevant articles, research reports or other literature and see if those link to their underlying data
Search for datasets using google scholar or a scholarly article database - this will bring up datasets and articles which include their data, along with a lot of possibly irrelevant stuff that you'll need to sort through.

We highly recommend that you seek a relevant data respository using Re3Data's searchable index before attempting an open web search, or use one of the resources listed below.

Re3data.org: Registry of Research Data Repositories
Re3data is a global registry of research data repositories that covers research data repositories from different academic disciplines. It includes repositories that enable permanent storage of and access to data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers, and scholarly institutions.
BC Open Data
The BC Data Catalogue hosts data from B.C. government ministries and public sector agencies. It contains thousands of datasets, many free for anyone to use under the Open Government Licence.
Borealis: The Canadian Dataverse Repository
Borealis, the Canadian Dataverse Repository, is a bilingual, multidisciplinary, secure, Canadian research data repository, supported by academic libraries and research institutions across Canada. Borealis supports open discovery, management, sharing, and preservation of Canadian research data.
Canada Open Data
This portal links to over 260,000 datasets from the following ten participating departments available to all Canadians: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada; Citizenship and Immigration Canada; Environment Canada; Department of Finance Canada; Fisheries and Oceans Canada; Library and Archives Canada; Natural Resources Canada; Statistics Canada; Transport Canada and the Treasury Board Secretariat. I
CanCoast
CanCoast is a geospatial database of the physical characteristics of Canada's marine coasts. It includes both feature classes that are not expected to change through time, and feature classes that are expected to change as climate changes. CanCoast includes: wave-height change with sea ice (early and late 21st century); sea-level change (early and late century); ground ice content; coastal materials; tidal range; and backshore slope. These are mapped to a common high-resolution shoreline and used to calculate indices that show the coastal sensitivity of Canada's marine coasts in modelled early and late 21st century climates.
City of Victoria Open Data Portal
Explore, download, or use maps to discover and analyze open data relating to census, financials, transportation, planning & land use, and more.
Federated Research Data Repository
The Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR) is a national, bilingual platform for sharing and preserving Canadian research data. The FRDR service provides Canadian researchers in any discipline with a robust repository option into which large research datasets can be ingested, curated, processed for preservation, discovered, cited and shared.
Geoscan
GEOSCAN is a bibliographic database for scientific publications of Natural Resources Canada (NRCan). The database features over 98,000 publication records primarily of the earth sciences (Geological Survey of Canada, National Atlas, Topographic maps, Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation, Remote Sensing and Geodesy, and Surveyor General), and is continually growing with records on energy efficiency, metals, minerals and mining. GEOSCAN also contains records on external publications authored by NRCan scientists and specialists or with NRCan support.
Lunaris
Lunaris is Canada’s national discovery service for multidisciplinary data from research institutions across the country. Datasets from over 90 academic, government, and research repositories are made discoverable in a bilingual interface that provides keyword and map-based searching.
Open Data Canada
According to the Canada Open Government website, open data is defined as structured data that is machine-readable, freely shared, used and built on without restrictions.
Open Data Portal Vancouver